The flax industry is making headway ridding the handling system of an unwanted genetically modified variety.
Nine percent of the 3,387 harvest samples processed this fall and winter tested positive for Triffid, compared to 10 percent of the more than 6,000 samples tested in 2009-10.
“You look at that and think that’s not much of an improvement. But in reality this is a dramatic improvement,” Barry Hall, president of the Flax Council of Canada, told growers attending the first session of the 2011 edition of Crop Production Week.
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The numbers are better than they appear because a more stringent testing protocol is being employed in 2010-11 that the council believed would result in a lot more positive results. As a result, a slight decrease was unexpectedly welcome news.
Hall said the improved testing protocol is also resulting in fewer Triffidpositive findings throughout the grain handling system.
The number of rail car shipments being rejected at Thunder Bay has fallen to four percent versus a high of 20 percent shortly after the industry implemented its European export protocol in October 2009.
Dave Sefton, a director of the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission, said there is one part of the supply chain where more Triffid is showing up.
The University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre has discovered that contamination of its breeder seed is wider spread than originally thought.
The centre is going back to the drawing board to ensure its breeder seed is cleaned up. It hopes to reintroduce some of the revamped varieties starting in the 2013-14 crop year.
“At that point in time we are going to urge producers to introduce the new seed into their production systems,” said Sefton.
Allen Kuhlmann, chair of the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission, said there is good reason the commission and the council are devoting so much time to the Triffid issue.
He estimates producers have spent more than $2 million on seed testing to date. Companies involved in processing and shipping the commodity have paid far more than that, costs that eventually filter back to growers.
There are other expenses as well. Kuhlmann knows of one company that spent $60,000 a month for more than a year storing quarantined flax in a grain silo in Belgium.
Peter Burnett, director of the grain research laboratory at the Canadian Grain Commission, said establishing and overseeing the export protocol has been a huge undertaking and a “very costly enterprise” for the commission.
The only way all the extra costs will disappear is if Europe agrees to move off its zero tolerance stance for unapproved GM traits.
Hall said there have been some positive steps in that regard overseas. The European Commission has proposed a technical solution that moves its level of detection on unapproved GM traits in feed shipments to 0.1 percent from 0.01 percent.
